Please try and direct discussion to the correct list, and try not to cross-post unless absolutely necessary.

Introduction

The process of improving the Web site should entail enhancing the user experience so that users may find the information they are looking for faster and easier than the way they are used to. Although major things that need improvement can be obvious to many people, some of these things can seem like tasks of epic proportions, too big for an individual to consider tackling on their own: single sign-on to all the different resources, the introduction of OpenID support, an online reference documentation editor - these are all non-trivial tasks that require knowledge of the existing site architecture and access to the site infrastructure. There are also minor features that matter to each of us in particular, but they are not always obvious for everyone else: automatic subscription to Wiki pages upon editing, various design improvements.

But the process of improvement has to solicit feedback in order to capture ideas about areas of improvement, and this channel for feedback should be easy to reach and visible to others. An example of such a channel is the online manual comments that one sees in the documentation for technologies such as PHP, MySQL (example) and PostgreSQL.

A lot of information causes frustration: that's why people prefer Twitter to Blogger. Too much "inventory" in the room makes it hard to navigate and hard to notice needed things. The process of cleanup should involve throwing unused stuff away, leaving relevant and updated information in place. Naturally, the Wiki has accumulated lots of arguably unused and dated pages, but various python.org pages are affected as well. Too much information reduces the "fun factor": a separate status page will help people see what's going on and let them have more fun by focusing their work and enabling them to work together with others.

Miscellaneous

Explain how to use .egg package archives. As a new user, I am unable to find anything, but I do find .egg files in the package index.

Even though natural syntax would be more welcomed this is a nice helper. Are there any side effects if the prefix is added lowercased? Seems like is still not possible for it to show word "issue" automatically. -- techtonik 2010-03-15 16:47:59

I'm just following the InterWiki conventions, really. I'm sure I should use PythonIssue:xxx instead, but I suppose Issue:xxx is unlikely to be used by accident. As for the prefix, it's only included in the title for the icon, I think. And as for autolinking, I think that would require a parser extension or modification. I'd personally be comfortable with a macro (like <<PythonIssue(xxx)>>), but then people would need to know how to use it, and it wouldn't obviously be natural to write. -- PaulBoddie 2010-03-15 16:56:18

Fix bug can't rename the page (A page with the name 'xxx' already exists. Try a different name.)

Can you give a walk-through of how to reproduce this? -- PaulBoddie 2010-03-15 15:44:04

Open JedIt page, click "Rename Page" on the left, select *jEdit* as new name and try to save. Note that there is no jEdit page. This bug previously occurred with attempt to rename Vim page. -- techtonik 2010-03-15 17:54:32

I just managed to rename the page to jEdIt (by accident), and although I thought that this could be a privileges issue because I am allowed to delete pages and you probably aren't, I just tried to fix the name to jEdit and I got the error. This case-sensitivity issue might be the problem, and the workaround suggested won't work, apparently, because even with another jedit page removed, the rename action still insists that one of these original pages still exists. -- PaulBoddie 2010-03-15 19:21:55

I've just tested page renaming on some local Wikis (running 1.6.x and 1.8.x) and they don't seem to experience this problem. -- PaulBoddie 2010-03-15 21:32:02

This just needs the feature to be configured properly. Then a system is required to add people to the exempt users list after their intentions have been verified. -- PaulBoddie 2010-03-15 15:44:04

Is there an automatic group for users with 10 or more successful edits? -- techtonik 2010-03-15 17:56:09

I think it all has to be done manually. It would be quite easy for spammers to make accounts, perform edits manually and then automate more spamming. The TextCha page has plenty of discussion about this, but I agree that it would be nicer to have some kind of workflow in the Wiki itself. -- PaulBoddie 2010-03-15 19:21:55

It is easier for them to automate TextCha entry than enter it 10 times manually and in the end have their accounts banned. -- techtonik 2010-03-16 08:25:16

Add improved event calendar support such as that provided by EventAggregator or another similar extension

Why? Trac's syntax, apart from the stuff that's identical to MoinMoin's syntax, is like the old MoinMoin syntax, and although it's better than MediaWiki syntax in various ways (take the link syntax and its inconsistencies), switching to it would be like reverting a number of fixes that MoinMoin applied when its syntax (particularly the link syntax) was changed in 1.6. I don't deny that bits of it can be complicated, but that's not usually the basic stuff. -- PaulBoddie 2010-03-15 15:32:26

Using Trac for various Python (and not only Python) I got used to separate [http://links with description using space] - as it is more readable. I can't see where [LinkPattern link syntax] will conflict with anything. Anyway it is the last point in this list. -- techtonik 2010-03-15 17:27:00

I've become accustomed to the newer syntax now, and I think there's probably some reason why they moved away from the older syntax, possibly for extensibility reasons where spaces can appear naturally and confuse the process of isolating arguments. I've not been too impressed by the Wiki capabilities of Trac, but that might have something to do with the visually unimpressive styling of Trac for most installations and the lack of MoinMoin conveniences, not the syntax as such. -- PaulBoddie 2010-03-15 19:21:55

MoinMoin is a general purpose wiki like MediaWiki and it may happen that old syntax created problems with porting content between them. However, for software projects, Trac and Google Code were inspired by the old variant of markup and there is no single ticket to switch to MediaWiki. I would really like to see reasoning behind the choice in MoinMoin 1.6, and know if there is a preference to turn on the old markup. -- techtonik 2010-03-16 08:20:29

A good summary of why the syntax was changed was posted in an IRC conversation on the #moin channel, and I've uploaded it here -- PaulBoddie 2010-04-23 11:36:53